There once was a boy band called SWAGGER who had a couple of hits in the late 80's, were very big in Japan and were once described by MTV as 'the reason why god invented dayglo'. Their debut album 'Batteries Not Included' went double platinum (in Norway) and they lived the high life, hanging out with Hefner at the mansion, opening for Frank Sinatra (Jnr) on his ill-fated 'Old green eyes is back' tour and trading gags with a comatose John Belushi and a bemused Orson Wells on Carson.

They had it all, they wanted for nothing and they were all set to take their career to the next level.

It really couldn't go wrong.

Until it did.

On the eve of releasing their much-awaited second album, 'Metrosexual' they disbanded suddenly after some serious 'musical differences'. The exact circumstances are now the stuff of myth but are thought to have involved a drum machine, Carole King, Perry Como and a jumbo-sized bucket of chicken wings.

Whatever it was that really happened we will never know but what we DO know is that at 4am one Thursday in June the three of them left the studios in Nashville in four limos - one heading North, one South, one East and one West.

And then they vanished.....

Maybe they were dead.

Maybe they were in rehab.

Or maybe they were just biding their time.

Over the years rumours abounded about their real whereabouts -

Simon W had apparently been variously spotted swimming the Atlantic, singing in the chorus line of the ill-fated musical adaptation of the Oxford English Dictionary and working in a gentle men's outfitters in Rhyll.

Martin R had been spotted working as a Max Headroom tribute act on the Northern Club circuit, selling truffles from the back of a camper van in downtown Vegas and as a gladioli wrangler for Dame Edna.

And Simon T had disappeared completely after his attempt to be the first man to single-handedly climb Anna Nicole Smith (without the use of oxygen) ended in public shame and the complete loss of all of his body hair.

Now thirty years later they have been tempted out of retirement by 'public demand' because one of their songs has been used in a straight-to-DVD episode of Glee.

The two Simons hate Martin because he still has all his own hair (and some of theirs) and Martin hates the two Simons because they have all the royalties.

But after an ice-breaking lunch at River Cafe they agreed to be photographed together for the first time....

Coming soon to a venue near you in 2014.

Contact: Suzanne Gluck at WME for availability for weddings, funerals, barmitzvas and circumcisions.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories was published in hardback by HarperCollins, London, October 11th 2010, and by HarperCollins, New York, November 2nd 2011. Paperback editions came out in London in July 2011 and in the US on 5th November 2011.

The International Board of Governors of the Circumnavigators Club is pleased to announce that distinguished author Simon Winchester will receive the 2010 Order of Magellan.

The Order of Magellan is bestowed on individuals who are dedicated to advancing peace and understanding in all parts of the world. Mr. Winchester joins outstanding individuals such as General Douglas MacArthur, Astronaut Neil Armstrong, author Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite in receiving the honor.

Mr. Winchester has written many notable books and articles about global events and has made a great contribution to world understanding. His new book The Atlantic, a biography of the Atlantic Ocean will be released on November 2.

The Circumnavigators Club, founded in 1902, is the only organization devoted to bringing together men and women who have circumnavigated the globe. The Club is dedicated to bringing the world together through fellowship and understanding.

Mr. Winchester will receive the Order of Magellan at the Union League Club in New York on December 10.

The Atlantic book tour kicks off in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch during the first fortnight in September. British publication is 11th October and the American pub date is 2nd November. Canada following shortly thereafter. More precise dates when my various publishers let me know.

I will be giving talks in the cities of Chongqing, Kunming and Chengdu on 29th - 31st March, to help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the re-establishment of the British Council in Western China. Specific details of the times and places to follow. Do please come if you can - an excellent time to see Yunnan and Sichuan.

Seldom can it be said that any one person ever managed to change the outside world’s perception of an entire nation, an entire people. But, beginning in 1954, Joseph Needham (1900–1995), a Cambridge biochemist, a figure dauntingly eccentric and brilliantly polymathic in equal measure, did just that. In this talk Simon Winchester, who spent two years tracing Needham's footsteps across wartime China, when the idea was born, will tell his remarkable story.

A graduate of Oxford University, Simon Winchester began his career as a journalist in 1967 and has covered numerous stories for The Guardian and The Sunday Times, including the Ulster crisis, the creation of Bangladesh, the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Watergate affair, the Jonestown massacre, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Falklands War. He has worked as a free-lance writer for more than 20 years, contributing to Harper’s, Smithsonian, National Geographic, The Spectator, Granta, the New York Times, and The Atlantic, and publishing several best-selling books. He has written The River at the Center of the World, about China’s Yangtze River; the bestselling The Professor and the Madman; The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans, which tells the story of his journey from Austria to Turkey during the 1999 war in Kosovo; and The Map That Changed the World, about 19th-century geologist William Smith. In addition he is the author of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 and A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. His latest book - and from which this talk is drawn - is The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom (May 2008).

On Tuesday evening in Manhattan - exactly one week after we first heard intimations of the dreadful news from Port au Prince - there will be a benefit for the victims at Idlewild Books, on 19th Street in Chelsea. I do hope those of you who can come, will come: we need to do everything and anything to help.